What are Demon3D’s visualisation and illustration features?

An important aspect of working with 3D laser scan datasets is the ability to visualise the data in a meaningful and useful manner. These visualisations can range from analysing geometric and topological properties of the model, such as curvature or accessibility, to more abstracted views of the dataset such as simulating illustrations of the dataset.

The core market sector that Demon3D is targetted is that of architecture and archaeology. Both of these disciplines typically use fairly traditional illustration styles as a means of recording buildings, structures and artefacts. In order to more easily integrate 3D scanning into the well-established workflow, we have designed several illustration-style visualisation modes such as pencil and pen-and-ink.

The following image shows Demon3D illustrating a Bronze Age wooden ladle in three different styles:

Bronze Age wooden ladle automatically illustrated by Demon3D

These illustration styles are rendered by Demon3D in real-time and update automatically as you rotate the dataset. This enables you to position the object in an orientation suitable for your illustration needs.

Architectural structures can also be illustrated attractively:

Orcheston Parish Church, Wiltshire

Demon3D also offers a wide spectrum of analysis functions that enable you to visualise various geometrical and topological qualities of the 3D dataset including curvature, triangle quality and point accessibility.

Orc Maquette rendered with Gaussian Curvature

Who are these features useful for?

The ability to interactively illustrate 3D datasets and generate publication quality drawings as output will be of primary use to archaeologists and architects.

Why would these features be useful to me?

Illustrating structures and artefacts can be extremely time-consuming and complex. Furthermore, additional illustrations can take the same amount of time to produce. With Demon illustrations take place in real-time and any additional illustrations desired can be generated by orienting the object to the new viewpoint and re-rendering.

By using Demon3D, quality illustrations can be produced in a very short space of time, cutting project time and costs.

All of the illustrations and analysis renderings generated by Demon3D can be saved as standard images in either JPEG, Windows Bitmap or Portable PixMap format which can be imported, touched-up and manipulated within
packages such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro.